Good Morning America, your King of Simple News is on the air.
I find myself in an embarrassing predicament; I’m at odds with the richest man in the world. Warren Buffet believes that the economy will not only get better, but future Americans will live at much higher living standards than those of us hanging around the planet today.
I like Warren Buffet and I respect him for his modest lifestyle, so I hope he won’t take it personal that I can’t agree with his rosy outlook. After all, I’m sure he reads the King of Simple News every morning. Ha-ha.
David Walker, the former chief comptroller general of the U.S. doesn’t agree with Warren either, so that makes me feel a little better. Mr. Buffet didn’t talk about resources, population, energy, or world commerce. He said that we will continue to experience growth. Mr. Buffet believes that growth is good and perhaps if I earned billions of dollars on the single premise of growth, I would say the same. Actually, no I wouldn’t.
It’s not that I believe that your lives can’t get better, I’m positive that they can. What I don’t believe, is that government is suddenly going to get their act together and create that improvement. And certainly that illusive improvement will not be based on growth, in fact, very much the opposite.
I often talk about paradigms (pronounced “para-dimes”), the meaning of which is, “A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.”
I also talk about “paradigm shifts,” which means to shift the very way that we view our current set of paradigms. Let me give you an example of monumental past shifts.
Our world before 1900 (a scant 108 years ago) was based primarily on the horse culture. Everything in life revolved around the horse for power and transport. When the gasoline and steam engines became commercially available, many people scoffed at the idea that these machines could replace the horse. Yet, this “paradigm shift” from the horse to the machine changed the entire world and all the paradigms or assumptions of the past were changed forever.
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